The number of results I'm getting back for searches has suddenly (in the last couple of months) dropped dramatically compared to what I used to get a year or so ago. This is similar to what several other people have observed recently.

One thing that I've noticed nowadays is that a LOT of the ultrapeers I'm connected to have very low bandwidth and a large proportion of dropped packets (I don't know how it was a year ago because I was happy then :-). For example, of the eight ultrapeers I'm connected to right now, the bandwidth and dropped packets look like this:

UP1: bw = 0.007/0.003 KB/s, Dropped = 71%
UP2: bw = 0.000/0.000 KB/s, Dropped = 70%
UP3: bw = 0.000/0.000 KB/s, Dropped = 69%
UP4: bw = 0.004/0.000 KB/s, Dropped = 67%
UP5: bw = 0.006/0.003 KB/s, Dropped = 55%
UP6: bw = 0.005/0.000 KB/s, Dropped = 39%
UP7: bw = 0.000/0.000 KB/s, Dropped = 36%
UP8: bw = 0.161/0.000 KB/s, Dropped = 14%

Notice that three of the eight are giving me 0 bandwidth, and four more are giving me less than 10 KB/s. Also, many of them seem to be dropping a lot of packets. This does not seem "reasonable."

My question is: what should my expectations be of bandwidth and/or dropped packets (or maybe any other relevant quantities) for a "reasonable" ultrapeer? Are there rough guidelines that I can use to decide whether a particular ultrapeer is a dud, and get rid of it?

(FWIW I'm running on DSL.)

Thanks a lot,
Curmudgeon